Group Progress

This week, my group and I got a lot of progress done. Before this, we were working on some features for Preswald, like latex integration and a download button. We were able to get our features done and submit a PR. Since my group was presenting first, we decided to work on our slides early on. We had no previous presentation to go off of, so we were kind of worried about how we were going to present. To remedy this, we ran through a practice presentation and felt better afterwards, since we got comfortable about the parts that we each planned to cover. In addition, we started to discuss our next contributions to the project. So far we were able to get some of our PRs merged recently since the project maintainers have been focusing on merging new features. We all had to do some work with making minor adjustments to our code, fixing merge conflicts, and rebasing.

Presentation

Overall, I think my group and I did a good job on the presentation. Since we had already practiced, we had a good idea of the flow of it. We went through a small introduction to what our project is and how we found them. We moved on to our first interaction with the project maintainers, and how we were able to get in a call with them very quickly. We also touched on the community, including the wide range of experiences we had. In addition to that, we showcased our contributions and explained the process of working on them. Lastly, we talked about the challenges we had, the best moments, and our final reflections on working on the project.

An interesting question we got was if it was discouraging when other people made PRs before us, since it was something we mentioned a lot. We answered that it was, but we changed the way we approached doing issues/making PRs. Since we started working on an issue in pairs instead of each of us doing one issue by ourselves, we were able to get more work done and faster. This strategy was something that we wanted to mention in the presentation which we skipped over, but the question allowed us to expand more on our group strategies.

Huggingface

Another group had their presentation, which was Huggingface. I found this presentation interesting because there was lot of information of how they tackled the issues they faced and their contributions. It was impressive because Huggingface is a very technical project since it’s in the field of AI and Machine Learning. The project itself is huge, and I had asked if a project of that size had a lot of competition for issues. One of the group members responded that they did have problems with people contributing to issues at first, but after they started claiming issues, things were much peaceful when working on them.

Next Steps

Since we have already made many contributions and got some of them merged, along with doing our presentation for the project and the end of the semester coming soon, my group and I most likely will not be making contributions at the same level as before, but we will definitely continue to be contributing to the project in a tangible way. Something we mentioned in our presentation is that we all had a good experience working on this project and learned a lot, so we want to continue contributing to it.